I finally got UBCD created and I've booted to it, and I see the UBCD menu right now on the computer that's got the questional TiVo drive mounted, but it's not obvious to me how to use this menu to test the drive. I'm still fiddling around with it though.

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I hope I can get this posted, as my main computer has gotten flaky ever since I installed the UBCD software, but anyway, I forgot that my keyboard has this weird quirk that everytime I switch computers via my KVM switch, numlock goes on. I turned it off, and now I can navigate the whole UBCD menu. I ran the 5 minute quick test on the TiVo drive, and I got: "TEST COMPLETED WITH READ ELEMENT FAILURE. ERROR/STATUS CODE 7". It then invites me to run a full media scan to resolve the issue. I assume that I should infer from this that it's a bad drive.

I have onhand a Samsung drive I can try to replace it with... I hope UBCD can also test Samsung; I'm about to search and see. The test I just ran was on a WD drive, and I used the built in WD diagnostic to test it.

Edit: Yes, UBCD does have two different versions of Samsung drive diagnostics... I'm now googling to see which version goes with the particular model I have.

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Welp, the Samsung passes with no errors, so I suppose I could now go about getting it imaged. I guess I'm off to research how to use MFS tools.

Edit: Wait, after rereading unitron's post, he lays it out simply for me, by providing an image link and offers me access to an exe file to install it. Thank you; that's very helpful. The way you've spelled it out, it sounds like I'm getting close to the light at the end of the tunnel on this.

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By the way, my wife has reiterated she doesn't need a bigger hard drive, but I'll concede that given her track records, I should not rule it getting something bigger than the puny 40GB Samsung I have onhand will be needed at some point.

But right now, I want to see if I can get the TiVo working with parts I have onhand because

a) What if something else is wrong besides the hard drive? I don't want to shell out for a new HD just to discover it's going to be a waste because the TiVo is not resurrectable.

b) I hate to keep the Craigslist girl (I guess I say girl, because she's a fair amount younger than me) dangling on the status of the TiVo, as we haven't actually come to an agreement on how much I'm willing to pay her for the TiVo, and I need to know how reliable it is before I come up with a number. I suppose if I'm going to cut it down to 40 GB (or eventually shell out for another HD) I could justify lowering her $50 number, but I do feel like it's worth something because of that lifetime sub, so if I get it working, I'm definitely going to pay her a reasonable amount of money. Surprisingly, she emailed me her address, and said I can simply mail her a check. That does seem to go against Craigslist protocol; she's very trusting (that the check won't bounce).

Well, I say trusting, but when I was in her condo (just a small condo from the looks of it), she had her front door open the whole time. Maybe she didn't trust me enough to be alone with her in her small condo with the door closed. I guess you can never be too careful with these Craigslist guys.

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At first it said something about a hardware malfunction, and that I must restart it, but it's probably because I had just put a new image on the HD. I had it connect to internet via ethernet to update account status, and it still said "no service" So I called customer service and they said no, it does have lifetime service.

I restarted the DVR as it requested and now it does say "Lifetime". All I really need to do now is go through guided setup. System info also confirms that space available matches what I'd expect given the hard drive that's in it.

So I think I'm in business, and in the process am probably now indebted to unitron, who was of great help getting this to work. He also helped me recently with another of our TiVos that broke and needed a power supply, as I explained a bit earlier in this thread.

The girl that sold me this TiVo said she kind of marvels at the kind of people that you can get to connect with your equipment when going through Craigslist. (I think in her mind, I'm some kind of TiVo expert and computer wizard, but really to be honest, I'm nothing compared to the experts in the TCF Help forum, especially unitron.)

So our house now has 5 working TiVos, all with product lifetime on them: 3 S2's, one Premier, and one TiVo HD. I think I've only paid for 2 or 3 lifetimes, as I've been getting good deals on lifetime by buying used.

Quote:

Originally Posted by timckelley

I hope I can get this posted, as my main computer has gotten flaky ever since I installed the UBCD software.

BTW, this is fixed now too. The flakyness was spam popups in chrome, and overall computer slowness. I used system restore to go back in time a few days, and all is well now.

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Well guide data is loaded, but when I hit Now playing, I get a message about a hardware problem preventing me from being able to record anything, or to watch anything in NP. I tested it, and I can schedule To Do items, but sure enough, it won't record. The specific error is "Error #51".

I googled, and this thread says that means the the TiVo service number on the motherboard doesn't match what's on the disk, and the fix is to do a "Clear and delete everything". Actually this does make sense, since this is a new disk with an image that didn't come from this TiVo, so maybe this error is nothing to worry about.

I guess I'll go do a Clear and Delete Everything.

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Yep, I was going to say something about this because you didn't mention it in the previous post, but I see you've figured it out.

Now, have you decided what your going to pay to the woman who gave you the Tivo?
Whatever you decide, I think $40 is a fair price since the Tivo has lifetime, even though you had to do some work to get it working.

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My wife's initial advice was to slash it in half to $25 or less because of the work involved. I told her that the fact that it has a lifetime sub is worth something reasonable, and I slowly worked her up to an agreement of $40, which coincidentally exactly equals steve's advice. I haven't emailed her yet, but I'm about to. Actually I'm not closeminded to the full $50 - I really think she probably deserves whatever the typical market value is for a lifetimed used S2 with a broken hard drive in it, but I'm just not sure what that is.

I could theoretically make an argument that what I now have is a working S2 with a puny 40 GB drive in it, instead of the 60 GB that was advertised, so I'm marking it down to $40. But I could in my mind make a counterargement that if this TiVo is eventually destined for an HD upgrade anyhow, whatever HD I threw in there to get it working is irrelevant.

It's possible, but I'm not sure, that had the ad said "lifetimed S2 with bad hard drive for $50", that maybe I still would have bought it.

BTW, the clear and delete everything worked, and all features appear to work just fine now.

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My wife's initial advice was to slash it in half to $25 or less because of the work involved. I told her that the fact that it has a lifetime sub is worth something reasonable, and I slowly worked her up to an agreement of $40, which coincidentally exactly equals steve's advice. I haven't emailed her yet, but I'm about to. Actually I'm not closeminded to the full $50 - I really think she probably deserves whatever the typical market value is for a lifetimed used S2 with a broken hard drive in it, but I'm just not sure what that is.

I could theoretically make an argument that what I now have is a working S2 with a puny 40 GB drive in it, instead of the 60 GB that was advertised, so I'm marking it down to $40. But I could in my mind make a counterargement that if this TiVo is eventually destined for an HD upgrade anyhow, whatever HD I threw in there to get it working is irrelevant.

It's possible, but I'm not sure, that had the ad said "lifetimed S2 with bad hard drive for $50", that maybe I still would have bought it.

BTW, the clear and delete everything worked, and all features appear to work just fine now.

Just giver her the $50. That lady helped you deal with your wife's OCD and saved you hours of being yelled at and reprimanded.

Just giver her the $50. That lady helped you deal with your wife's OCD and saved you hours of being yelled at and reprimanded.

One problem might be that if $50 is too much, my wife will likely give me grief for paying that much. And I just did a quick look at ebay for lifetimed malfunctioning S2's that got sold, and the few I saw went for $20 - $30, so maybe $40 is more than reasonable. I suppose one reason the market value is lower is because only a relatively smaller subset of potential buyers are willing and able to fix them.

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One problem might be that if $50 is too much, my wife will likely give me grief for paying that much. And I just did a quick look at ebay for lifetimed malfunctioning S2's that got sold, and the few I saw went for $20 - $30, so maybe $40 is more than reasonable. I suppose one reason the market value is lower is because only a relatively smaller subset of potential buyers are willing and able to fix them.

She said she would accept what you think it's worth. Checking ebay completed auctions is an objective method of determining the value of an item.

Yes, the sale is completed by the way. Based on my review I felt that $40 was more than enough, so I offered it, and she enthusiastically said "Sold!", and also told me how happy she was that I got it working, as it makes her feel better that her TiVo will have a good home and live on. I've already paid her the money now, and the TiVo is still working fine.

I got the impression that she was very happy with the $40. I do remember when I was over at her place mentioning to her that it's a shame that people can't recover their lifetime fees when they sell their TiVos, but she quickly dismissed that saying that she got her money's worth out of it, given the number of years worth of monthly subscription fees she never had to pay.

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Oh and he was too cheap to buy another VCR (I don't recall the idea ever coming up) and I was just a kid. He spent a ton on tapes for shows he'd never watch though. He could have bought another VCR and got by with 2 tapes instead of 50 or whatever it was and spent the same $$$. Probably a bit penny-wise and lb-foolish relatively speaking although he probably made better use of his time which is priceless.

What would happen if you started deleting the oldest of her shows from the NAS to make more room as you go? Would she even notice? You know she's never actually going to watch the vast majority of this stuff right? I think she has a sickness and you are her enabler.

__________________Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it's time to pause and reflect. --Mark Twain

At some she'd probably figure it out, and I'd be in hot water. But if this 9TB (actually 12 TB, but 3TB are used for RAID5 protection) ever gets filled up, I'd like to think she'll do some weeding out to make room.

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Yeah… I agree. That's probably not gonna happen. Hoarders don't typically give up anything unless they are forced to or it's causing them some type of hardship. As it is, most of the hassle is falling on you. She can basically just keep doing what she's always done with no repercussions. It's like the 600 lb. people who can't get out of bed. Somebody is bringing them food… In this case it's you.

If you really want something about this to change (and I'm not saying you do), it's going to have to come from you and she's going to have to get real about her hoarding issues. Of course, there are far more harmful things in life than digital hoarding, and I understand wanting to help your wife and keep the peace, but that's the reality in my opinion.

__________________Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it's time to pause and reflect. --Mark Twain

Have you considered going to an Unraid box? It sounds like you're savvy enough to enjoy the hobbyist aspect of building your own box and adding drives as you need them. This latter "user upgradeability" with consumer HDDs and the support for HDDs of different sizes makes this a *great* solution for digital hoarders.

I am at 18TB but when I get free weekend I need to put my new Unraid box together and move all the drives over to utilize my 3 new 4TB drives.

It seems amazing that I'm well into the second decade of lurking in your thread. It might be the longest serial thread I've ever participated in!

Considering how many hours a 1TB drive holds on a TiVo Premiere XL (just in HD programming, not even considering what it would hold in SD content), if your wife filled a 3TB drive and hasn't actually consumed that content then as others have said here, you have a serious problem -- or should I say that your wife has a serious problem here.

30 years out she's never going to watch the content that she's holding on to, and you're going to have kept tossing hardware at the problem because you love her and storage is cheaper than the argument or disappointment over the loss, but seriously this is the kind of thing that people typically are sent to help to get past.

I'm bad at hoarding things digital/electronic, but after a while, it just becomes more stuff that is not needed. Eventually you might have that light bulb go off for your wife, but for as long as you keep trying to keep it from being an issue the underlying problem isn't going to be addressed.

Continued best wishes to you (now, tell me again who you are buying drives from so I can purchase some shares of stock in that company since you'll be a customer for years to come )

Well my wife has been acknowledging lately that she spends too much time managing her TiVo recordings, and she's said several times I should move forward with my idea of axing Time Warner and setting up OTA in our house (possibly supplemented with other programming like netflix, amazon, hulu, etc).

I finally got around to ordering a Venturer digital converter which arrived yesterday... I wanted to set it up on one of our S2s to make sure I know how to do it, and that it will work. I just completed the programming of the converter, and the guided setup of the S2, and I think it works perfectly. (channel changing is not as instantaneous as with cable, but I understand that's normal - still just take a couple of seconds or so.) I was pretty surprised that we pick up 18 OTA channels quite clearly. I'm not sure how many of those are good/useful channels...for example a few are in spanish.

I'd love the idea of saving $ by getting rid of Time Warner and am completely on board with this notion. One thing I worry about: my wife has been more heavily in the business of archiving shows than actually watching them, though she certainly does watch TV. Cable works well for archivers, because TiVo will record those shows. But I don't think netflix, amazon, or hulu will let you archive. I did explain to her that those places have their own complete archive that we can dip into whenever needed, so no need for us to archive... they've already done it for us. I hope she can grok this philosophy.

Meanwhile, she can continue to archive OTA shows, and among our 18 channels, there could be a fair amount of worthy content among them. If we really move forward with this, I need to buy a certain amount of (reasonably cheap) equipment.

We have 5 TVs (2 of them HD), and 5 TiVos (2 of them capable of recording in HD format and have built in OTA tuners). I own one cheap rabbit ears antenna, and as of yesterday, one digital converter box (which I got used for $23 from ebay, free shipping, brand name = Venturer).

So I still need:

4 more antenna (I quickly found some for < $8 free shipping, and for I know, there might be better deals than that out there)
2 more digital converter boxes

But I'd be annoyed if I bought all this, canceled our Time Warner account, and then my wife says we really need to go back to cable.

I also told her that if I call to cancel, I expect they'll probably try to talk me out of it, and make an offer to lower our cable bill if we don't leave. It kind of sounds like my wife would consider such an offer if it were low enough. But I'd never call to cancel on a bluff - if I call, I'm calling because I'm willing to cancel.

So that bring up another problem. What if I buy the above equipment so that I'll be ready for the OTA transition, then call to cancel, they offer an aggressive deal for me to stay, my wife wants to take the deal, and then I'm stuck with this wasted equipment I just bought.

I wonder if I could call to cancel as of some future effective date to give me time to acquire the equipment, so that if we change our mind and don't quit cable, I have the option not to buy the equipment.

I may be worrying about nothing, because I think one reason the OTA attracts my wife is because the amount of recordable content won't be so massively huge, and she feels like it'll induce her to spend less time recording stuff.

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Hey you never know. Cutting the cord might be just thing to help her break free of her habitual archiving. Your last sentence kind of makes me think even your wife is getting a little sick of the habit. If it doesn't work out you can always go back /shrug. All you'll be out is a little time. If it cures or lessens the effects of the hoarding, it'll be worth it.

__________________Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it's time to pause and reflect. --Mark Twain

I wonder if I could call to cancel as of some future effective date to give me time to acquire the equipment, so that if we change our mind and don't quit cable, I have the option not to buy the equipment.

My dad has Time Warner and I was helping him with a problem. As I was researching, one of the things I read said you got the best deals from TWC if you cancelled with an effective date in the future. The post said that gave them time to contact you and make you better offers than the normal retention folks who answered the phone. And apparently, they're happy if you call to un-cancel as well in case the equipment doesn't work or your wife gets cold feet.

So, I could have this all put in motion, and then I go to order the equipment, and a few days later, but before the termination date is reached, I get a call from TWC with an offer, but I've already ordered the equipment. I guess this could still be the same type of problem I was worried about. I was assuming that by the conclusion of my phone call, I'd know if we're really cancelling or not, but it sounds like with future termination dates, I can't assume that.

I did tell my wife this morning that our kitchen TiVo is all set up with OTA, and I was hoping to get impressions from her on how much she likes it, and if it's okay to set up the whole house like that. She apparently doesn't have time to learn how to use it (not that it takes much training... I tried to show her the dashes in the channel numbers, but she didn't have time to listen to that), she told me to talk to her about it this evening.

Maybe when she thinks about it, she'll say to cut TWC counteroffer or no counteroffer, which would simplify things. Actually I need to figure out if I'm under a contract first... I don't think I am, but I'm not positive.

Actually I do have a bundled deal of internet + cable, and my idea is to go to internet only. Maybe they'll somewhat raise my cable price for not being in a bundle anymore, which I guess is okay, since our monthly bill will still drop, but if they charge too much for internet, I'll shop elsewhere for good internet deals. I'd prefer cable based internet though, because it works better with our ooma telephone.

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